Customizing Sametime Connect Entry 8.5

The IBM Lotus products are sometimes a bit messy to customize. Many customers want a silent installations that does-the-whole-job, which includes:

Hard coded server address

Swedish dictionary

Some features on or off by default

I have created several packages of Lotus Notes, Lotus Symphony and recently Lotus Sametime.

The problem with Lotus Sametime (as with Lotus Symphony) is that there are many undocumented features. And doing even the simplest thing can be troublesome. Also the manual sometimes contains outdated information. Whats good about customizing Lotus Sametime is that it is only text files that needs to be editied. It’s not like when customizing Lotus Notes where the buggy (but useful) InstallShield Tuner for Lotus Notes has to be used.

Anyway, this is how I did it:

using “optional-components-update-site.zip” i extracted the 2 dictionary files and included them in the Sametime Connect installfiles

Updated site.xml (copying information from site.xml in the above zip-file)

Updated install.xml (the tricky part, and I copyed the line from the american dictionary and modifyed it)

Updated install.xml to include Outlook integration

Updated silentinstall.ini

Updated plugin_customization.ini

I ran into two major issues doing this package:

Dictionary refuse to install and leaving the whole installation broken

Interface language still enlish even though “silentinstall.ini” explicitly says swedish

To solve part 1 I had to dig into the logfiles, and finally I found out that it had something to do with signing. However I found a solution:

Note: After updating the install.xml file to point to those jar files, you might receive the following error message: SEVERE CWPST1015W: Plugin com.ibm.langware.v5.dic.es_ES.feature_5.3.1.9-200810091628 failed to install. The reason provided is CWPST1001W: No signature found

com.ibm.rcp.security.internal.update

And the solution is to add this to [installdir]/deploy/plugin_customization.ini

Thanks, this helped me a lot. I ran into this bundling a third party plugin into sametime. Can this be avoided by having the plugin signed? If so, by whom?

Lastly, for the life of me I can’t discern the difference in the msiexec string you posted versus the one in the sametime.standalone install folder provided in the 8.5 release, unless I am overlooking something. What was the difference?